Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006). 538 pp.
As a young believer in Sunday school I was taught rather straightforwardly that the gospels were written by real, historical persons with a direct relationship with Jesus of Nazareth. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John told their story just as it was lived. The Gospels (and all of Scripture) were divinely inspired and as such were inerrant and authoritative.
After I graduated from high school (and from my local church) I began my formal education. My first classes introduced me to form criticism, source criticism, and many other criticisms. Even though most of my professors held to a high view of Scripture, one could not help but view the Bible with a healthy skepticism. In the end, I was taught that the gospels were the product of many anonymous sources lost to history. The Jesus of the gospels was the Jesus of a received tradition developed by the faith community. The real Jesus, the Jesus of history, has become hopelessly lost in the layers of anonymous tradition and we must be content with the gospels in their final canonical form.